I Need Two Wicks Per Candle and Produce 1,000 Candles a Month — How Many Wicks Should I Hold Including Testing, Rejects and Safety Stock?

The multiplier belongs in the base, before any allowance

Start where the arithmetic starts. 1,000 candles a month at 2 wicks each is 2,000 pieces of base demand, and every allowance that follows is a percentage of that number rather than of your candle count. This sounds obvious written down and it is the single most common place a two-wick build goes wrong: a maker calculates allowances on 1,000, adds them up, doubles the total at the end, and arrives at a figure that is correct by accident. Double first. Everything downstream is then in the same unit, which is pieces, and a piece is what you buy.

The figure that matters for the rest of this page is 2,000 pieces a month, worth ₹18,880.00 at the Thick (C2) rate of ₹9.44 a piece. Hold that in mind beside the other number this build carries: a candle in this example costs ₹985.43 in materials, so the whole month of candles is ₹9,85,430.00 and the wick line is 1.92% of it. The wick is the cheapest thing in the build and the one that stops the bench when it is absent, which is the whole reason a holding calculation exists for it at all.

One honest framing before the worksheet. Two wicks per candle is your approval, not ours. CSI publishes no burn times, melt-pool diameters, flame heights, consumption rates or soot measurements for any wick in the range, nothing of the kind exists in our data, and no CSI wick page carries a diameter-to-wick sizing table. The live guide at best wick for candle making by diameter carries the general selection logic. What this page does is take the configuration you have already approved and turn it into a quantity, a pack combination and a rupee figure.

Three allowances, three different jobs, all of them your own percentages

The question names three things on top of production and they are genuinely separate. A test allowance covers wicks that will never be in a saleable candle because they are in a trial pour. A reject and repour allowance covers wicks consumed by candles that were meant to sell and did not make it. Safety stock covers wicks you hope never to touch, held so that a late delivery does not stop the bench. Roll them into one number and you lose the ability to explain why the number moved, which is the only reason to write it down in the first place.

Test allowance — the wicks that never reach a customer

Even with an approved configuration, an operating candle business keeps burning candles. A new fragrance in the same vessel needs its own confirmation. A new wax lot, a new vessel lot and a seasonal change in your workshop temperature are all reasons to pour a small set and watch it. At 2% of base demand — the figure used throughout this page, and an assumption you should replace with your own — that is 40 pieces a month, ₹377.60. On a two-wick candle that is 20 test candles, which is a handful of three-candle repeats rather than a programme.

Reject and repour — the wicks a failed candle takes with it

A rejected candle is two wicks, two wick stickers and a vessel you may or may not recover. Chipped glass on arrival, a crooked set, a sunken top that cannot be heat-gunned flat, a batch poured at the wrong temperature — each of those costs the full wick count of the candle, not half of it. At 3% of base demand, again your own assumption rather than anything we have measured, that is 60 pieces, ₹566.40. One of the reviews carried at the top of this page is a four-star note about tin vessels arriving with small dents, and that is exactly the kind of event this row exists for: the vessel is the thing that failed, but the wick inside it is spent all the same.

Safety stock — the wicks you hope to leave alone

Safety stock is not consumption and should never be counted as cover you are using. It is the depth that absorbs a late delivery or a month that runs hot. At 20% of base demand it is 400 pieces, ₹3,776.00 — about six days of pouring at this rate. Set it deliberately: ask how many days of production you are willing to lose, convert that to pieces at 2 a candle, and write the reasoning next to the number so the next person to look at the sheet can argue with it. If you would rather derive the depth from how long your supplier takes, note that CSI publishes no lead time, so that figure has to come from your own delivery records and not from any page on this store.

The worksheet: 2,000 becomes 2,500

Here is the build in one place. Base demand, the three allowances, and the figure you hold. The working requirement — what you actually expect to consume in a month, before safety stock — is 2,100 pieces. The holding figure, which is what you buy, is 2,500 pieces at ₹23,600.00. Keep those two apart on the sheet: the first is a consumption forecast you can check against the pour log at month end, the second is a stock position you can count on a shelf.

The pack combination that fills 2,500 exactly

On most supply decisions the pack question is a price question: buy the bigger box, pay less per unit. That is not what is happening here. Each Eco grade is flat per piece at every pack size it offers, and the Thick (C2) rate is ₹9.44 on the smallest pack and ₹9.44 on the largest. So the pack combination cannot save you a rupee on the unit. What it can do is make you buy pieces you did not plan to buy, and that is the whole of the decision.

Read the fourth row as the cost of tidiness. Three 1,000-packs is one fewer decision and 3,000 pieces in the drawer, which is 500 more than the sheet called for and ₹4,720.00 of cash sitting on a shelf earning nothing. On a product with a volume ladder that overshoot might pay for itself in a lower rate. Here it cannot, because there is no lower rate to reach. Of CSI's wick families only the Performance Wooden Wicks rate moves with pack size at all; the pre-tabbed cotton lines and the ready-made braided line are flat from the smallest pack to the largest.

Where ₹23,600.00 of wick sits in a ₹9,85,430.00 month

The build behind every figure on this page, stated once and carried throughout: 550 g of Premium Coconut Soy Wax CSI 468 at 8% of wax weight, which is 44 g of Mahogany Teakwood fragrance oil and 594 g poured in total, in the Premium Glass Clip Top container, whose page publishes a wax fill of 550 g and dimensions of 11 cm by 11 cm by 10 cm. The other reading of the same sentence — 550 g of total poured fill at 8% — would be 509.26 g of wax and 40.74 g of oil, so this page states which it uses and uses it everywhere: 550 g of wax, 44 g of oil.

On the ceilings: the Premium Coconut Soy Wax CSI 468 page states a fragrance load of up to 13% and gives a melting point of 50–53°C with a pour temperature of 58–60°C. The Mahogany Teakwood page states 7–9% in soy wax, IFRA certification, and that slight amber-toning is possible in white or uncoloured wax over time from its wood and musk base. Where two published figures apply the lower one governs, so 9% is the ceiling here and the 8% used throughout sits inside it. The oil page gives a minimum cure of 48 to 72 hours; treat that as the earliest a candle can be test-burned, because throw in soy and coconut-soy keeps developing, and 14 to 21 days is standard practice for container candles of this kind.

The wick line is 1.92% of the month and the whole holding, safety stock included, is 2.39%. Now the part that is more useful than either percentage: at this scale the wick line is the only one of the four you can fill from the published packs. 1,000 candles at 550 g of wax is 550 kg of wax a month and 44 kg of fragrance oil, against published pack ladders that stop at 10 kg and 1 kg; the container is sold as a single piece rather than in packs. Those three lines are a WhatsApp conversation about quantities past the published packs. The wick line is three items in a cart at a rate printed on the page.

Before you buy 2,500: the configuration is what sets the multiplier

Everything above assumes 2 wicks per candle because that is what the question says. It is worth saying plainly what that assumption is worth in rupees, because it dwarfs every allowance on the sheet. Two Thick (C2) wicks are ₹18.88 a candle. One Cotton Braided Wicks Ready Made piece, whose page states it is engineered for large-diameter candles exceeding 8 cm and stands 10.16 cm tall, is ₹12.00. That is a difference of ₹6.88 a candle and ₹6,880.00 across 1,000 of them — half as much again as all three allowances on the worksheet put together, which come to ₹4,720.00.

We are not telling you to switch. The container page publishes outer dimensions of 11 cm by 11 cm by 10 cm and a 550 g wax fill, and an outer dimension is not an internal diameter; no CSI wick page publishes a diameter-to-wick table; and we publish no burn data of any kind, so nothing here can tell you whether one piece behaves in your candle the way two do. What it does say is that a single-wick route exists in the range for vessels this size, that it is cheaper per candle than doubling, and that it is worth a three-candle repeat before you commit to 2,500 pieces a month of the alternative.

Two more range facts belong in the same breath, because they close off routes a maker often assumes are open. CSI's pre-tabbed cotton range is exactly two sizes — Thin (C1) at ₹5.90 and Thick (C2) at ₹9.44 — so there is no third gauge to step to if the double is too hot or the single too cool; the honest moves are the other grade, the other family, a lower load or a different wax. And the by-the-metre lines are not a shortcut here: Eco Braided Wicks and the 2 inch loose eco wick arrive untabbed, CSI sells no loose wick tabs, and the only tabbed cut-to-length option is the Braided Wick Roll with 100 wick tabs at ₹706.82, which is a hundred tabs rather than a production supply.

Freight: where the quantity decision actually touches cash

There is no quantity discount to chase on a cotton wick, so the only money a purchasing decision can move here is freight, and freight on this store is a set of published flat bands by weight rather than a rate per kilogram. That makes the question "which band does my parcel land in", not "how much am I buying". The month's wick order — two 1,000-packs and a 500-pack — carries a combined stored packed weight of 1.4 kg.

Read the last row before you take the saving as a rule. The consolidated parcel sits at 13.5 kg, which is 1.5 kg below the edge where Standard stops and the cheapest available service becomes ₹2,400.00. One more oil pack in the same box and the ₹360.00 saving turns into a far larger loss. This is why the general advice to "consolidate your orders" is only half an instruction: consolidation is cheaper inside a band and dearer across one, and the only way to know which you are doing is to add up the stored packed weights before you build the cart.

There is a second, quieter reason the wick order should ride along rather than travel alone. A flat band treats a feather-light parcel like any other, so 1.4 kg of wicks sent on its own costs ₹180.00 to receive — 0.76% of the order's value for a box you could put through a letterbox. Inside a parcel you were already sending it costs nothing at all. That is the one genuine argument for buying two or three months of wick at a time, and it is an argument about freight and about how often you want to place an order, not about the unit price, which does not move at any quantity.

What this page deliberately does not tell you

No allowance percentages from us. The 2%, 3% and 20% used throughout are illustrative, labelled as such everywhere they appear, and chosen to demonstrate the method rather than to recommend a level. CSI publishes no test, reject, scrap or breakage rate for any product and none exists in our data. Your own count sheet, kept for a few months, is worth more than any figure a supplier could print.

No lead time, so no days-of-cover version of this sum. CSI publishes no supplier lead time, no dispatch guarantee and no per-city transit estimate. The safety stock on this page is therefore built as a share of monthly demand, not as a number of days, and anyone who wants the days version has to supply the span from placing an order to opening the box from their own delivery records. The store publishes three named shipping services, each carrying its own transit wording — Standard Shipping is published as "Delivery in 10-12 Days" — alongside a request to allow 1-2 business days for order processing. That is the whole of what is published about timing, and this page does not go past it.

No burn figure, and no sizing chart. CSI publishes no burn times, melt-pool diameters, flame heights, consumption rates or soot measurements for any wick in the range, none exists in our data, and this page quotes none, including by implication. No CSI wick page carries a diameter-to-wick sizing table either. That is why the 2-wick configuration is treated throughout as something you have approved rather than something we have recommended, and why the single-wick comparison above is a price comparison and nothing more.

No claim that this formula fits this container. The Premium Glass Clip Top page publishes a wax fill of 550 g and dimensions of 11 cm by 11 cm by 10 cm; those are the figures this page uses and the vessel is priced per piece. An outer dimension is not an internal diameter, and the internal measurement is the one a wick decision rests on. Pour one, weigh it, and record the fill you actually settle on before you scale any of this to a thousand.

And nothing about safety on our say-so. A multi-wick candle in a wide vessel puts more heat into the glass than a single wick does, so keep the usual discipline and keep it conservative: trim before every light, burn within the window you have set yourself, never leave a candle unattended, keep it away from draughts and anything that can catch, and retire any configuration that makes the vessel hot rather than warm. In an Indian summer, where a workshop in Delhi or Ahmedabad can sit above 40°C and a Mumbai monsoon keeps everything damp, a configuration approved in January is worth re-watching in May. We have not burned your candles and cannot tell you that yours is safe.

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